Length: 2,500 words
Characters/Pairings: Quadrant-flipping Kankuro/Gaara shenanigans, with incidental Temari.
Warnings: Don't try to make sense of the universe this takes place in. It's like...Naruto universe but with troll characters, or something. 8T Uh...death, blood, all that good stuff. Actually not an incest-warning, because as trolls they aren't actually related, and besides it's not a sexual relationship.
Notes: I went back and reread Naruto and came to the conclusion that Kankuro had a massive, repressed pitch-crush on Gaara that bordered on platonic murderous hatred at times, Temari kept nervously trying to intervene ashen, and Gaara didn't give a fuck. Until he started trying to care about what his teammates wanted, at which point all of a sudden Kankuro abruptly flipped nervously but intensely pale, and only continued to get more and more pale as time went on. All I did then was turn them into trolls so I could have a cultural pre-existing model to work with. :)
Your name is Gaarra, known to most of the village you were raised in as The Deserted. You're young for an adult title, but you have earned it through prodigious bloodshed and ruthless disregard for life. As a short-lived lowblood, your unique abilities to lengthen and strengthen your own life by taking the lives of others is of considerable concern to your "superiors". Your village is terrified of you. Your teammates even moreso.
You don't care.
Or at least, you didn't care, until a few hours ago.
A few hours ago, you met a boy with blood no higher than yours, but with powers even wilder and more fearsome. A few hours ago, you looked him in the eyes and knew he could kill you.
A few hours ago, he cried and bled and told you he was so, so sorry for you.
You have never felt anything quite like what you are currently feeling. You apologized to your teammates; they were shocked, of course. You've never apologized for anything, not ever, you've always considered them...less. But you've had a very trying few nights, and people you thought of as less than you have beaten you and wounded you and driven you to the edge of death and pitied you, and the apology was so much easier to say, somehow, than you expected.
...is that a quadrant?
You've never been taught much about quadrants—even as powerful as you have become, as far as you have overstepped the normal bounds of your bloodcaste, you are not considered a prospect to fill a quadrant with any sane troll.
You know this.
You still have to repress the strange feeling that you should not be allowing your teammate to support you in your first and only moment of weakness. That after all Kankro's terrified posturing at you, after every time he's dared to hiss at you from behind that smeared deathmask of paint, even you, with your rudimentary understanding of the quadrants, find it painfully obvious he desperately wants to rival you. His resentment of you is a constant stench around him.
...not now, though, for whatever reason.
You don't have the energy left, after your fight, to do more than glare at him as he carries you, and you are fairly sure that he doesn't even notice. His paint is smudged, and the yellows of his eyes are still bloodshot from lingering indigo madness and chakra loss. He's staring ahead, one eye squinted shut into the faint glow where the sun will soon rise, chewing on his lip and obviously thinking. He doesn't pay you any attention.
Perhaps you could do more to justify his hatred of you? Is that what he wants from you?
You let him carry you until the sun starts to glint on the horizon, and then you shift, hanging on his shoulder, and snarl softly.
"Put me down," you order him. You know he hates taking orders from you, but he just thins his mouth and half-glances down at you. Your horn almost hits him in the jaw. Maybe you shouldn't have apologized to him before, is that not acceptable?) "You smell bad," you mumble, and then your neck stops lifting your head and you flop sideways onto his shoulder. If your dignity was not already in tatters, and the proud, angry voice howling into your head was not already curbed by your exhaustion, you would be humiliated by that, but you're just...so tired.
He doesn't take the bait, and he doesn't shake you off either, which is perhaps more jarring than if he had dropped you.
"Shut up," he says instead-not unkindly. He sounds almost as tired as you feel, and somehow, even though now of all times he should be gloating over how weak you are, there's no hint of mockery in his voice. "...please."
Well that's frankly unnerving.
Temari seems to think so as well-she comes up alongside you in a smooth leap, keeping pace in the air. Her hair is coming out of its jagged ponytails, whipping inky black against her needle-sharp, arrow-straight horns. If you put folded paper in between those horns, they would look like a fan, you think.
You are so tired.
"Do you...need me to take him?" Temari looks worried. As unnerved as you are, then, by Kankro's sudden failure to posture and growl and snap at you. Of course, she's always acted very ashen when Kankro made one of his thinly-veiled, semi-platonic advances on you-although that certainly seems to be the last thing on his mind now. If you are going to attempt to please them, should you reciprocate his black urges? Could that be considered mutually to her ashen interest in you?
Your head hurts.
"I'm fine," he says, and not only does he continue to allow your head to rest on his shoulder, he hitches you a little higher, so that it rests more comfortably. She looks as surprised as you feel. "Do we have somewhere to rest for the day?"
"...we should stop before we hit the desert," Temari says, and you can hear in her voice the conversation that is not yet happening but will certainly happen in the future. 'we need to talk' is a tone she has a lot of practice assuming. "We'll stop there. If...that's okay, Gaarra."
Oh of course. You always made sure they deferred to your authority on things, didn't you? The last thing you want to do at the moment is make a decision on something like this.)
"I don't think he's even really conscious," says Kankro, and you actually find yourself jumping slightly in shock as the arm not supporting you wraps around and a hand probes at the throbbing wound on your chest. You snarl at him, much more energetically this time-this physical pain is still alien to you, at once closer and more removed than the pain in your heart-but it sounds weak and dizzy, even to your ears.
He mumbles "Hey, stop," and pats your shoulder.
Everyone is silent for a second, and very, very still. You think his feet are resting on a branch, but you really can't tell-yours barely touch the ground and he's still not letting you down.
"...I..." says Temari, very slowly. "...did you just-"
"No," says Kankro, very quickly, and then his hand withdraws, your head drops away from his shoulder, and you're flying again, leaving Temari to scramble to catch up.
But his hand is still tight on your wrist, and he doesn't let you go.
You understand exactly jack shit.
By the time you reach the village, things are a little more normal again. You're strong enough that the voice in your head sometimes overwhelms you and you have to pull your sand in close and keep it from touching them. But something is different.
Kankro still snarls at you sometimes, absent and instinctive, but now he stops, and not just out of fear. He looks at you like he's seeing something you don't understand, and clenches his hands like he doesn't want to want to reach for you.
You'll feel bad, later, that you went to Temari first, trying to understand—but she knew better and she only told you as little as she needed to. And her eyes were watching your teammate over his shoulder; watching him watch you talk to her, and putting together the signs that you didn't see.
"...I don't think...I should tell you," she says, and you can see her watching you to make sure you won't snap at being denied, but she also doesn't look like she has any intention of giving in to you. "...I...you should...he should tell you."
He doesn't actually tell you.
But when another assassin comes at you, a month or two after The Day You Changed, when he picks up your teammates with his mind and throws them out of his way, and the voices you've been fighting every waking second scream at you from the inside of your thinkpan and the scar carved above your eye throbs with pain, when the sand rises around you like angry jaws-
-Temari's fan brings the assassin down with a spatter of teal blood and Kankro picks himself up, and looks at you like he's...confused by you, like you're something he wants to understand. And he takes one step towards you, and then another, and holds out a hand through the haze of swirling, hungry sand, so slowly the sand never tries to stop him.
"...we got it," he tells you, and smiles his crooked smile, one side higher than the other, one eye squinted at you like a wink. "...you don't have to."
You want to crush him in your sand and drink his blood and take his life for yourself.
Instead you stare at him and say, "...I thought you hated me."
"I did," he says.
"Why don't you hate me now?"
He cocks his head on one side, lets his cold hand rest on your cheek, and doesn't answer.
Nobody ever asks you what he is to you, although you're sure people ask him sometimes what he thinks he's doing. He needs to soothe your bloodlust less and less. You start to understand morals, ethics, good judgment, and you point out to him the times when he goes cold and dangerous, purposely taking the course that lets him kill the most, choosing the path that drenches him in blood. Once, you finish your part of your mission before you'd planned, and you go to find your teammates-when you find him, his black clothes and his paint are drenched, unrecognizable with bloodstains. You wind the sand around his arms and legs and hold him still as he snarls and snaps and when you hesitantly pull back his hood he jumps and stares at you like he's never seen you before.
You've never seen his face without his hood, you realize that night. You've never seen his horns-they're not the heavy, strong, cat-ear shapes you imagined from the way they shape his hood, they're back-swept and almost elegant, and his hair has streaks of purple at his temples and the base of his horns. You've never seen his face without his paint, or the faint scars that the paint covers up.
He is unspeakably embarrassed about the entire affair later, and it is endearing in a way you didn't realize you were capable of feeling.
You never say the word "pale". You never need to.
By the year of your death, you might as well have shouted it to the entire village. Temari says so, anyway. Temari says a lot of things. Temari says a lot about boys from the village hidden in the leaves, and lazy asshole ceruleans who won't shut up but he's so stupid and pathetic and he cried after a mission, what the hell is up with him?! Temari says she still feels weirdly ashen for you and Kankro and then laughs and tells you it feels really weird to be ashen for two people who aren't pitch for each other. Temari says she's found a picture of the previous ruler of the village, and when you look at the picture, and you look at your (moirail) teammate, you both know what you're seeing. Even under all the paint and the black hood, ancestry is ancestry.
Kankro says he wants you to take over anyway, and highbloods be damned. You say but aren't you a highblood as well. Kankro rolls his eyes and doesn't say anything.
Except where you can't see him.
If there's one remnant of that immature, directionless pitch left in him, it's the way he refuses to let anyone tear you down, not to your face and not behind your back. It's like he's protecting you as a rival—except he doesn't claim the right for himself either. If he thinks anything hateful, it's locked away behind his slowly-brightening purple eyes, and the white glint of his smiles like masks.
You fight.
You lose.
You never see him poisoned and bare-faced and in pain, and you are glad of that. You were unconscious, you never even knew he was fighting for you, or that your closest friend was running home as fast as she could, plagued by dreams and nagging fear. You don't wish that you had seen him that weak and raw-but you feel the strange urge to snarl at the thought that others did.
The first thing you see when you wake up is Naruto. The second thing is your moirail.
He doesn't rush to you. He just sits and watches them flock around you, and he smiles. Then, after the long journey back, the greetings from all your worried subjects, after you're finally back to your palace, drained as you never have been before, he grabs you almost roughly and holds on to you so tight it hurts, and you're so glad there's no sand to protect you from how grateful he is to have you back.
Temari says after they let him out of the hospital he went into a rage like he hadn't for more than two years, wrecked his room, broke a hand and cracked a horn punching and kicking and breaking everything he could reach, and there was nobody there to calm him down. She'd cracked him on the back of the head—she hopes (with a dry smile on her lips) that's not too pale for you to pardon. You make a show of considering it and then nod like a gracious highblood and go to find your moirail.
You have fixing to do.
I just want to write characters from non-Homestuck fandoms being pale all over everything. You don't understand how many non-troll non-Homestuck pale ships I have. YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. I love the quadrant system so much, goddamn.
This was originally like two paragraphs written in skype for a friend, but I edited it up really quick. So here. Have this. :)